Why aren't we awesomer? | Michael Neill | TEDxBend

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences.
Michael Neill is a coach, adviser, friend, mentor, and as founder of Supercoach Academy, an international school that teaches coaching from the inside out. He helps transform lives through his writing, teaching and public speaking. To Neill, happiness is our natural state, and we're always just one thought away from peace.

You made it. (Laughter)

I've been studying the human potential
for about 25 years now,

and throughout that time,
everything I've done

has been an attempt to answer
a sort of a simple question:

why aren't we awesomer?

(Laughter)

Given everything that we know
about psychology and the human mind,

given everything thousands
of years of spiritual teachings,

and just life experience,
and the advances in medicine,

and the deeper understanding of the brain

why is it that some days
we can get up in the morning

and feel touched and inspired
by the hand of God,

and other mornings,

we can't be inspired to take a shit?

(Laughter)

I kind of figured there wasn't going
to be one answer to that question

(Laughter)

and over the first 18 years or so,

I found a lot of things
that were really helpful.

About seven years ago, I stumbled across
a very simple answer to that question;

and what made it simple
is that it's just a misunderstanding

that we have culturally
about how the mind works.

And that's what I want
to talk to you about today.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said:

"A man will be imprisoned

in a room with a door
that is unlocked and opens inwards

as long as it does not occur to him
to pull rather than to push."

It's that simple,
but what is that door for us?

Well, in order to take you there,
I want to take you back, it's 1986.

And I was not a happy kid,
I was a depressed kid.

It didn't feel particularly that it was
because I wasn't useful;

I was loved I was, you know,
surrounded by friends.

I had no external reasons
for being so unhappy,

but I was so unhappy that I had a thing
I now know is called suicidal ideation,

which meant that I thought
about killing myself a lot,

all day, every day, ongoing.

This wasn't as much of a problem
as you might think, most of the time,

because I had stuff to do,
I'd have classes to go to, I had friends.

But it was always going on
in the background,

and when it would get quiet outside,
it would get really noisy inside.

And this all came to a head
in October of that month

when I had what I now know is called
a psychotic break from reality.

If you want to get a sense
of what that was like,

imagine being in my dorm room
on the fourth floor,

and a giant vacuum cleaner
appearing in the sky

and sucking your heart
out of your body and out the window.

This was actually terrifying to me

because it really felt
like it was happening.

I hung onto the wall of my dorm room,
and there was a phone there.

I reached down, and I dialed the number
for the suicide hotline, which I knew,

and I got a busy signal.

(Laughter)

Even then, being sucked out the window
by a giant vacuum cleaner from hell,

I found that funny.

(Laughter)

I cannot imagine what anyone
could have said to me

that would have done more good
for me than that busy signal

because it just kind
of popped it in my head,

and I just popped out of it for a minute,

and it didn't seem so compelling,
it didn't seem so real.

I was able to reach down and phone
a friend who lived on the first floor,

and she came and got me,
and eventually I fell asleep.

I woke up the next morning,

and I realized something
that was kind of profound:

I didn't want to kill myself,
I didn't want to die.

In fact, I so didn't want to die
that I used every ounce of strength I had

to stay in that room

when everything felt like
it was pulling me out that window.

And that was the first time I realized

that just because you have
a thought in your head

doesn't mean it's your thought,
doesn't mean it's true,

doesn't mean it actually is
what you think,

it just means there's
a thought in your head.

I started to kind of think of it
as the suicide thought,

and I started to notice
- because I wasn't scared of it anymore -

it's kind of like Bob, the homeless guy,
moved into my brain.

Every now and again he went off on one,
and it was like, "Oh god, it's Bob again."

(Laughter)

Not that I had to do something about it,
it was just the suicide thought,

and of course,
because I wasn't scared of it,

It passed through quicker and quicker,

and I found a new level
of freedom of mind,

and that got me really interested
in how the mind worked.

In order to share
how the mind works with you,

I'll take you through a series
of little experiments,

so, we're going to begin
with a picture a monster.

(Laughter)

I noticed none of you are running
to the exits screaming (Laughter)

so this is good,

this means you're not having
a psychotic break from reality right now,

you have a sufficient level
of thought recognition

to see that this is in fact a drawing
of a monster by my daughter Macy

and is not in fact, in any way,
shape, or form, a real monster.

Here's the second one; this is also
a representation of a monster.

This is a tarantula spider.

In 1997, I'd been doing
this work for a while,

and I was invited onto a television show
in the United Kingdom

called "Put it to the test".

It was a really cool show

because they took popular ideas
and they put them to the test,

and the segment right before me
was they wanted to see

if a car could really stop on a dime

(Laughter)

So they got this stunt driver in this car
and put the dime out there;

he's going 60 miles an hour,
and he did it, he stopped on a dime,

it was really cool,
but that's not why I was there.

I was there to put
the NLP phobia cure to the test.

I'd learned from doctor Richard Bandler
a way of working with phobias

that usually, in 30 minutes or less,

somebody who had
a lifelong phobia of something

could be with it without any fear at all.

And they took three people
with diagnosed phobias

and a couple of doctors,

they hooked them up to EEG machines,
EKG machines, so that you could see

what was going on inside them
when they saw the spiders,

and sure enough during the show,
I worked with them,

and then they came back,

and they would even hold
the spiders in their hands

and almost nothing.

And in fact, it was so dramatic

that the doctors asked
to recalibrate the machines

because they thought
it couldn't have been real;

same thing happened again.

For me that wasn't the amazing part

because I'd seen that happen
hundreds of times before,

the amazing part was what happened
during the dress rehearsal,

because during the dress rehearsal

the same people were hooked up
to their machines,

and the stage manager came in
with a clear, plastic empty box

and said: "During the show,
there will be spiders in this box."

All three of them started
going crazy on the machines,

and I thought: "Holy crap,
there're no spiders here."

As far as I know, there weren't
even any spiders in the building,

and I suddenly realized we're not afraid
of what we think we're afraid of,

we were afraid of what we think.

We can't tell the difference

between an imagined experience
in here, and what's going on out there;

and that confusion creates
a lot of confusion,

it creates a lot of problems.

We'll take this one step more, alright?

Some have seen this image before;
what I'd like you to do is

- I asked them to bring
the lights up a bit

because I want you
to raise your right hand

if you can see the young
woman in the picture.

OK, fantastic.

Now I want you to raise your left hand
if you can see the old woman.

OK, and raise both hands
if you can only see one of them.

And look around,
that's a large part of the room.

Is this really a picture
of an old or a young woman?

Well, both or neither,

but in fact, that's how
we think of the mind,

we think the mind is a camera,

and it's recording
what's really going on out there,

but depending on how we use it,
we have a different experience.

So, if I photograph her
from this angle, she's really young,

but if I do it from that angle,
she's really old.

If I look at life this way,
it's an wonderful experience,

if I look at it this way,
it's very depressing;

that's the idea behind positive thinking.

As we change our attitude,
we change the angle

from which we hold the camera,
and we get a different experience of life.

But here's the thing: this is not
a picture of an old woman,

and it is not a picture of a young woman,

it is a series of lines
on a piece of paper.

(Laughter)

We're the ones creating
both the old and the young woman.

Let's take another one.

This is an illusion called
the Kanizsa's Triangle.

How many of you can see
the white triangle bold in the middle?

Fantastic! You're all making it up,
there is no white triangle,

(Laughter)

it's an illusion, it's created by the mind

to make sense of the negative space,

it is not brighter or duller
than anything else.

Isn't that interesting?

We make up something
we can all see, and it's not there.

I wonder if that might have implications
to how we live our lives.

(Laughter)

Let's take another look.

I want you to raise

- this is called the silhouette illusion
or the spinning woman -

I want you to raise your right hand
if you can see her spinning clockwise.

Now I want you to raise your left hand

if you can see her spinning
counterclockwise.

Look around.

Now just for fun, just for fun, see
if you can get her to change directions.

You can close your eyes
and look back. (Laughter)

Now, which way is she actually spinning?

Neither, she doesn't exist. (Laughter)

This is why the physicist David Bohm said:

"Thought creates our world,
and then says 'I didn't do it'."

(Laughter)

We live in a world of thought,

but we think we live
in a world of external experience.

The mind does not work like a camera,
the mind works like a projector.

I first came across this
about seven years ago

in the work of a man called Syd Banks;
he wasn't a physicist or a therapist,

he was a welder from Scotland
living in Saltspring Island,

and he had an enlightenment experience
when he was talking to a psychologist.

He was telling him about all his problems,

and the psychologist said:
"You don't have problems,

you're not insecure Syd,
you just think you are."

Well, Syd heard that

to a little bit deeper level
than we all just did.

For him, from that moment
thought stopped,

and he could see
the projection of the mind,

and he could see that all
that was ever happening

was that mind was projecting
thought onto consciousness.

Like in a movie, the projector of mind
takes the film of thought

and projects it onto the screen
of consciousness,

and it really looks like
it's happening out there.

We experience it, and we hear it,

and it's scarier, it's exciting,
it's awesomer, it's terrible,

but none of it it's actually happening
outside of our own minds.

How is this significant?

Well, I was looking
for a way of illustrating this,

and one my students showed me this.

(Laughter)

This explains every bad relationship
that you have ever had,

(Laughter)

and it explains why we struggle

because we think the problem
is with the other dog.

We think the problem is: "Well,
I need to just learn to love that dog."

There's no dog! (Laughter)

It's a creation of the mind,

and when you start to see that,
the mind slows down,

and when the mind slows down,
something else comes through.

The mystic poet William Blake said:

"If the doors of perception were cleansed,

everything would appear
to man as it is, infinite.

For man is closed himself up

till he sees all things
through narrow chinks of his cavern."

And that's us,

we've learned to live
in the world of circumstance

as if the only way for us to thrive
is to control that world;

to make that world
the way we want it.

Yet our experience is of a world
that doesn't even exist

until the moment we create it,

and ceases existing the moment
a new thought comes along.

What that means is

just because a thought is in your head
doesn't mean that it's true.

What that means is we're not afraid
of what we think we're afraid of,

we're afraid of what we think;

and what that means is

that no matter how long
you been stuck with something,

no matter how real a problem looks,

no matter how intractable
a difficulty seems,

you're never more
than one thought away

from a whole new experience
to being alive.

Thank you.

(Applause)